If you want to go to an elite medical school in Texas, and you buy into the newest rankings from U.S. News and World Report, you’ve only got two choices. For research: Baylor College of Medicine ranks 10th nationally, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, ranks 19th. No other Texas school […]
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We’ve previously discussed the effects of flat, or even cuts in health research funding before, here and here for starters, but it’s time to revisit the issue. According to the most recent analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, funding for the National Institutes of Health in President Bush’s 2008 budget request […]
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Imagine hearing the terrible news from a doctor: you have breast cancer. The doc probably determined this from a core or surgical biopsy after finding a lump. The next step is to determine a course of treatment. But what if you would like to look inside the breast before surgery, or to monitor the effectiveness […]
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The British Medical Journal wants to know. Launched in 1840, the journal is asking readers to choose from 15 important biomedical advances since then. There’s a link atop the journal’s home page that you can use to vote. Here are your choices, as selected by a panel of experts: • Anesthesia • Antibiotics • Chlorpromazine […]
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Unlike Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern and a host of other elite research universities, Rice University doesn’t have a medical school. But with the 21st century rapidly becoming the age of biomedicine — in such forms as biotechnology and nanomedicine — what is Rice to do? This: With the lines between the traditional academic disciplines of medicine, […]
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Speaking of bad ideas, I’m inclined to agree with The American Journal of Bioethics that the following video really is “the dumbest stem-cell propaganda ever.” Apparently the video was produced by the Ninth Floor Project, a “project to design a symbol for the overwhelming majority who support stem cell research.” They’re off to a bad […]
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Yesterday I went “behind the curtain” with two Houston doctors. I spent the morning seeing patients with Dr. Keith Bourgeois, an eye surgeon at Downtown Eye Associates, and the afternoon with Dr. Thomas Granchi, medical director of the emergency department at Ben Taub General Hospital. I’d like to thank the Harris County Medical Society, which […]
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There’s been a fair amount of discussion here about how humanity may be innately bad, or at least its technology is. I don’t dispute that much of technology can be used for ill means. But for those who contend that most, if not all progress is bad, I would submit that your message might not […]
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Nobel Intent has a thought-provoking entry on the plight of today’s young biomedical scientists. The discussion centers on a recent editorial in Cell by Robert Weinberg, an influential cancer researcher. The Cell article requires a subscription, but in summary, it makes a compelling case that the current NIH funding policies are “driving a whole generation […]
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You probably don’t think about it much. Just like the fire department and the police, when there’s an emergency you expect your nearby hospital’s emergency department to be waiting. Now, after three years of work the Institute of Medicine has released a series of three in-depth reports chronicling the mounting troubles faced by U.S. emergency […]
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